Taking the Struggle from the Rittenhouses to the Financial Houses

When I first got the idea to write an article addressing the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, it was only a few days ago, and I figured I would be able to publish the article within a day, because I'd already written a couple posts examining the issue from my perspective on Facebook, and it would only be a matter of editing to consolidate them into one.

But Marxism is a science, not a dogma, and when our understanding of the facts change, our application of Marxism must change as well.

The Rittenhouse shootings are a massive front in the culture wars, and that much was already obvious to me. This first post I made is my summation of the correct line as I understood it as of a few days ago:

Trying to mobilize the broadest possible coalition against imperialism means that from time to time people will disagree about certain tangential issues, and cancelling them on that basis only weakens the struggle against imperialism.

I am of the opinion that Kyle Rittenhouse came to that protest to do violence to BLM supporters, and he was let off by a racist justice system. Is Rittenhouse a racist? I don't know his heart, only his actions. Am I willing to work with people who disagree with me about Rittenhouse? Sure; we live in a society permeated by false consciousness, and expecting educational and moral purity of my comrades in these material conditions is utopian. Maybe I'm the one who's mistaken about Rittenhouse; maybe you are, but the point is ending imperialism because it underpins the rule of the bourgeoisie, who require racism domestically to sustain themselves here.

So calm down, everyone, and focus on the real goal here.

The emphasis in that blockquote wasn't in the original post; I highlighted it because it's a special tool that will help us later. But for what it's worth, I stand by the main thrust of this post, and don't consider it too far off the mark. America's racist justice system exists out of a bourgeois need to divide the workers against each other to sustain their rule at home and abroad; punching at its effects instead of its causes is like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole that you're fated to lose. Maupin and the CPI have been putting out similar lines, and it's just good theory and praxis to stay focused on the real danger to the workers and the movement, American imperialism.

But, beyond that basic line, the post was both wrong in a key way, and right in a key way. It was wrong because I took a line that distinctly set me apart from the working class (although I didn't know it yet), but it was right because I had enough humility to concede the possibility that I might be wrong about the Rittenhouse verdict.

The fact is, about 85% of the country is working class. Which makes this poll, conducted by Breaking Points, the newscast with the largest viewership in America, especially curious:

It's a poll on the internet with a self-selecting sample. But even so, it's got enough respondents, and the results are lopsided enough, that it's definitely reflecting an aspect of reality that I, in my middle class treason, did not perceive before. And when the working class takes a wildly different view on an issue than the majority of the communist movement, it's worth asking why. Granted, the workers believing something doesn't automatically make it correct. After all, they have to learn socialism in the first place from middle class academia, because bourgeois false consciousness deliberately keeps them in the dark. But Lenin did the work of investigating that phenomenon in order to explain it, and the workers' overwhelming views in Rittenhouse's favor deserves an equally thorough investigation.

I do still think that Rittenhouse did not act perfectly; bringing guns to a peaceful protest is a bad idea. Learning after the fact that two of the people you shot to death had done nasty things previously in their lives (pedophilia and domestic violence) is not justification for killing them. Rittenhouse had no way of knowing these details before he pulled the trigger, and was not shooting at them for those reasons.

The reaction of the police is especially galling. From the get, they treated him like a hero in a way that someone who wasn't white would never have been. Cops shoot black kids holding toy guns, no guns at all, whatever, and they get paid vacations for it. Whatever the facts of the Rittenhouse case, the hypocritical double standard is infuriating, and rightly so.

Buuuut... he's a stupid kid, and we don't usually hold the crimes of children against them as adults for good reason. And from looking at the footage, he made stupid decisions, albeit in what was probably actual fear of his life. Granted, those stupid decisions probably gave his attackers/victims legitimate cause to be in actual and justified fear of their lives, prompting the deadly confrontation. There are no heroes here, just misguided idiots turned into their worst selves by our maddening culture war.

Furthermore, Rittenhouse doesn't seem beyond redemption. Even though every culture warrior on Team Red wants him to be their congressional intern, the kid used his primetime interview with Tucker Carlson to announce that he supports the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement. BLM is an ideological dead end for communists, but a 17-year-old conservative kid probably only understands it as "they want justice for black people, and I want justice for black people, so I guess I support BLM." It's a demonstration that he's learned something from this ordeal. Communists should be looking to turn enemies into allies, not pure vengeance. Rittenhouse's evolving views can't bring those three dead people back to life, but they are a sign that we shouldn't throw in the towel on him on a personal level.

The workers are probably taking all of the above into account when they side with Rittenhouse, as well as the Democrats' own actions. Even the centrist bloats at Politico have noticed the Republican wave building this year, and have found the whole Kenosha issue to be a big chunk of the reason why. Let's say you're a worker in Kenosha, WI. What did the protests do for you? Destroy your neighborhood? Turn your neighbors against each other? And all to try to overturn the right to self-defense, which you probably consider a pretty important right, and one of the few left to your class? Racism is bad, but antiracism can't excuse literally anything, and this is why the Republicans are about to rule Congress again.

So why did the academic middle class largely want to throw the book at Rittenhouse? This was the second post I made on the topic:

On their face, most Republican political positions appear counter to what communists want, but tend to align with what we want in the long term somehow.

Struggling to see how the celebrations of Rittenhouse do anything good for us. Maybe it'll provoke a conversation that'll keep anything like this from happening again? TBH that's a guess. I'm honestly disgusted with my team right now, but I'm not going to be some Never Trumper centrist shill over it either.

I think a lot of us took the position we did on the Rittenhouse case not so much because of the particulars of the case, but out of disgust with the people cheering on Rittenhouse. The Proud Boys support him because racism, and most GOP politicians support him because of the grift. It is pretty damn easy to hate those motivations, and to instinctively want to oppose anything that makes these weasels cheer. Even if you're trying to dodge the culture war like I was, the in-your-face obnoxiousness of a lot of the pro-Rittenhouse camp is as alienating as the middle class pinkhairs on the other side. Even just posting relatively tame takes like these inspired the Debate Me Bros to fire off insults into my inbox, and I've got absolutely no time for that shit.

But justice isn't determined by what will piss off the dumbest mouth-breathers on the internet the most, it's determined by the facts of the case. The workers can't afford to be distracted by irrelevant Facebullshit, they must focus on what's most important, on the truth. And the truth is, self-defense is a valid legal argument, and the justice system rightly takes the foolishness of children into account.

So even though I set out to write an article about trying to tune down the culture wars to fight imperialism, I ended up writing an article about the ever-present need for the middle class to interrogate our own biases and assumptions. Class treason isn't a salvation experience; you don't accept Karl Marx into your heart as your Comrade and Saviour and then suddenly everything you think, say and do isn't middleclassity bullshit anymore. You still have that sinful nature within you, you're still predisposed to be a capitalist simp despite your best efforts, and so class treason is an ongoing process. Hopefully by laying out my own embarrassing realization here, I will help normalize the interrogation of the middle class and keep us all from wandering into ideological traps.

As far as lessons here for broader society, maybe we shouldn't be bringing either guns or children to protests. This goes for both sides. There is going to be a temptation on the left to pack heat more often now; to a degree this is good and probably healthy, because gun control is not a Marxist position. But the biggest takeaway is that the culture war ruins everything it touches, and definitionally keeps half of all good people from seeing the truth in any given situation without deep introspection, which most people are not inclined to do as a matter of course.

Of course, I don't expect that this little article is going to change much. I expect these protests to get more extreme and more violent. I would recommend to my comrades, really to anyone of good will reading this in general, to adopt the praxis of the centrist dad at a barbecue in regards to the culture war. Be friends with your neighbors, cut across the culture war as much as you can, hate each other less and hate the bourgeoisie more. Don't let the culture war get in the way of loving your neighbors. Do this, and you and yours will be safe while the pinkhairs and the Proud Boys kill each other in the streets. Hopefully by following this praxis, we can all limit the coming death toll to middle class nutters.